Insel Read online

  In recent decades, Loy has often been cast as a modernist feminist and Insel is read as a radical détournement of Surrealism’s problematic modelling of gender and creativity. Notwithstanding the rhetorical force of her “Feminist Manifesto,” the form of Loy’s feminism remains hard to define. Figuring herself, in “Pazzarella,” as an enemy of “the sacred and inalterable front of masculine solidarity,” Loy writes of having evolved in adolescence “a weird strictly personal form of feminism of which the militant aspect consisted in being peculiarly benign to any woman who had been ‘pushed’ ” (“Islands in the Air”). These idiosyncratic politics did not lead her into public activism on suffrage or education policy. Her feminism does, however, register in startling ways upon her work and, indeed, upon the economies of power and desire between Mrs. Jones and Insel in this novel. What makes Loy’s feminism so fierce is its brutality—but perhaps only the revolutionary violence of her proposal for “the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty” (“Feminist Manifesto”) is adequate riposte to the patriarchally straitjacketed society into which she had been born. Subtending all of Loy’s writing is a furious resistance to the oppressive regulation of female embodied experience and a commitment to unsettling essentialist binarism. In Insel, she plays out a narrative of reversed (and markedly unstable) gender polarities: making Insel the childlike, unstable and linguistically impoverished male muse to Jones’s powerful, older female patron. The dynamic of their physically and psychically imbricated interaction is no more traditional than it is simple.

  The story of Insel’s composition and publication is a convoluted one. Loy is presumed to have started work on the novel in Paris some time after Oelze’s arrival there in 1933, and to have developed and edited the novel after her relocation to New York in 1936. Folders in the Loy archive at the Beinecke Library containing multiple handwritten and typed drafts bearing substantial editorial marks, along with innumerable fragments and variants, attest to a prolonged and multiphased authorial process. In spite of these efforts, to Loy’s disappointment, her editorial exertions on first one, and then the other side of the Atlantic, did not result in the novel’s publication in her lifetime.

  In her unpublished dissertation on the author, Marisa Januzzi relates how Loy’s ambitions for the book’s publication were confounded in her lifetime. In December 1953, James Laughlin, editor at New Directions, returned the manuscript of Insel to its author, with regrets. By 1960, Loy’s daughter Joella was also invested in the project to see Insel realized in print but, though Laughlin wrote to the author again in that year, praising her larger “Islands in the Air” manuscript but cautioning that much “compression” would be required, their correspondence failed to yield a published text. In a letter of 1961 to Elizabeth Sutherland at Simon and Schuster, Laughlin identified Insel as the most readily publishable component of “Islands.” Though the editors were in agreement on its merit, Sutherland eventually returned the text in 1963. Here, the history of Insel stalls.

  In the course of archival research for her doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 1990), Elizabeth Arnold found the typescript manuscript for Insel at the Beinecke library. Intrigued by the text, she was convinced that the manuscript had been left by Loy in a publication-ready state. After writing a chapter on the novel in her dissertation, she set out to pursue Insel’s publication and approached John Martin at Black Sparrow Press. Arnold’s editorial efforts—underwritten, as Conover points out in his original introduction to the Black Sparrow edition, by a recognition that “nothing had to be altered”—brought Loy’s long prose, for the first time, into print. Conceived in Paris in 1936, carried as a collection of notes and ideas to New York, and there compiled, edited and (at least) twice rejected, Insel finally saw publication in Santa Rosa, California, in 1991.

  In October 2013, I came across the “Visitation of Insel” in a folder marked “YCAL MSS 6 SERIES 1 BOX 2, FOLDER 39: INSEL: FIRST DRAFT FRAGMENTS” in the Beinecke Library. In her 2013 essay on Loy, Amy Morris alludes briefly to the “Visitation of Insel,” designating it “a prose fragment from the late thirties or early forties.” A single sheet of paper, empty but for six words, is housed in the same folder at the archive. It reads: “End of Book Visitation of Insel.” This note unambiguously identifies the “Visitation” as an intended addendum to the novel. Like the “Visitation” passage with which it is housed, it is materially congruent in terms of paper, writing materials and handwriting with the holograph fragments which constitute the novel’s early draft notes. And yet the “Visitation of Insel” sits at a strange angle to the published text: the fossil of an authorial intention later revoked. Provoking questions as to authorial intent, working practices, and even the rightful designation of its own terminal point, the “Visitation” might complicate, but it does not compromise the validity of the posthumously published novel. The novel, as it was published in 1991 and is republished here, remains Loy’s last edited and corrected draft of the text. Whatever authority once attached to Loy’s note, the “Visitation of Insel” was excluded from subsequent drafts by the author herself. Nevertheless, its existence is exciting.

  The end of Insel finds Mrs. Jones taking leave of Insel in Paris as she prepares to join her daughters in New York. Their last meeting is bittersweet. While the narrator is exhilarated by the decision finally to sever their connection, her companion is vaguely stunned by this definitive dissolution of their relationship. He seems, nonetheless, to appreciate its inevitability. With Jones’s earlier promise to deliver him into Manhattan either forgiven or forgotten, Insel’s valedictory expression of globalized gratitude—“Danke für alles—Thanks for everything”—closes the novel.

  Set, we can surmise, some two years later, the “Visitation” opens with the narrator as alienated newcomer in the New York domain of her daughters Sofia (also referred to as “Sophia”) and Alda, and the extra-diegetically invoked Aaron. Here, as in the contemporaneous prose piece, “Promised Land,” these characters correspond to Loy’s daughters Fabienne and Joella and the latter’s husband, Julien Levy. The autonomy enjoyed by Jones in the novel is, in the “Visitation,” greatly diminished. Her daughters have become her keepers and her gallery agent “business” is revealed as a latterly regretted stroke of largesse on the parts of Alda and Aaron. Most bruisingly, the narrator’s inching progress on her book—already, in Insel, the cause of much self-castigation—is described by her elder daughter as a ploy to “get more money out of” her resentful relatives. Alda’s charge, “ ‘You’re no good—never have been any good—’ ” is received by the beleaguered narrator as “blank truth.” Resonating with her own low estimation of herself, this taunt acts as a sort of psychic propellent which sends her reeling.

  Left alone, hungry and incapacitated by ulcer-induced pain, the narrator retires to a couch. Her solitude is soon ruptured by the “Visitation of Insel.” An apparition manifests itself in her room, a surrealist “presence” which the narrator recognizes as Insel. Divested of all “shreds of flesh,” Insel is now a palpable “invisibility.” A mute ghostly force, he projects his thoughts directly into her brain. What follows is a disquisition on her onetime friend, charge, muse and occasional tormentor: an often bewildering exposition of Insel’s character from which some astounding conclusions are drawn. At the end of the episode, the narrator is eventually recalled to reality by the voice of her younger daughter who, having returned, demands assistance with her preparty toilette. In a jarring shift, the “Beam controlling a surrealist man” collapses bathetically to “the high-light on a fallen curler.” When the incorporeal “Sur-realist Being” is replaced by the very emphatically fleshed—“clammy,” “honnied”—body of Sophia, a specifically maternal materiality reasserts primacy over the psycho-spiritual realm. By structuring the passage in this way, Loy bookends the fantastic “visitation” scene with the banal quotidian. The “Visitation”’s core of hallucinatory philosophy is set within this frame of unhappy
domestic “reality.” Echoing the effect of her earlier encounters with Insel in the novel, the narrator of the “Visitation” is left disoriented in his wake.

  The “Visitation” presents Insel in terms that are at once familiar and significantly developed from his characterization in the novel. Imagery associated with light, divinity, electricity, technology, the manipulation of time, healing and doubling are carried over from Insel. Here, as before, peculiar powers are ascribed to his eyes. Some concepts relating to the pineal gland and “blind back”—charged though they are with intertextual allusions—are less immediately intelligible. The Insel of the “Visitation” is understood by the narrator to have undergone a further phase of evolution since his last appearance in the novel. While this advancement augments his powers, it also makes him vulnerable to explosion. By projecting himself into New York, Insel risks being dynamited with his “own force.” In addition to the changes undergone by Insel, a major transformation is seen to have taken place in the narrator’s perception of him. Whereas, in the novel, she shies from the suggestion that Insel’s dissipation might, after all, be a product of morphine addiction, the narrator of the “Visitation” unshrinkingly salutes the revenant as “my drug addict.”

  Prior to addressing the reverberations of that revelation, I want to plot the lines by which the Insel who manifests so unexpectedly in Manhattan might be related to his characterization in the novel. In both book and addendum, Insel is figured as a semi-divine entity. In spite of his many unsavoury attributes (including lustfulness, mendacity, unproductivity and criminality) he retains a paradoxically angelic aura of sanctity. Repeatedly associated, in the novel, with an “especial clarity of the light” (this page), Insel’s status as otherworldly “man-of light” is indexed to the degree of his material tangibility. Having arrived, in the “Visitation,” at a state of absolute immateriality, he is perceived to hang from the “cosmic consciousness by a ring of light.”

  Among the most striking of Insel’s attributes in the novel is his capacity to generate what he calls his Strahlen, or rays. A curious amalgam of supernatural, spiritual and corporeal elements, these rays are generated by, and temporarily obscure, the revolting appearance of his flesh. In Insel, the eponymous anti-hero’s degree of fleshliness fluctuates constantly. Watching him swing between extremes of embodiment and immateriality, Jones comes to associate these fluctuations with the waxing and waning of his Strahlen. The physical environment of those in range of his rays is repeatedly seen to alter itself in sympathy with Insel’s state of mind. Constituting a sort of fluid ephemeral exoskeleton, these rays provide the infrastructure for the psychic bridge between Insel and Mrs. Jones. These magnetic rays also possess capacities for healing; they nullify “the lightning hand of pain” (this page).

  Insel retains this function as “magnetic healer” in the “Visitation.” Indeed, there inheres a suggestion in the opening fragments that the narrator’s ailment—which eventually “turned out to be a duodenal ulcer” (this page)—may have somehow summoned the surrealist spirit to her side. Upon Insel’s arrival, “the pain lay dead among the shadows”; both physical and emotional suffering are immediately salved. As Carolyn Burke, Loy’s biographer, notes, the author received a corresponding ulcer diagnosis in 1940. A psychosomatic explanation is posited by the author for the incidence of this longterm complaint. In “Islands in the Air” and the short essay, “Tuning in on the Atom Bomb,” Loy associates the ulcer with atmospheres of culpability and condemnation, and with the operation of a pernicious internalized “Voice.” A remnant of her mother’s habitual recriminations, this “Voice” was incorporated into her own psyche in childhood and persists even into her own motherhood. Given Loy’s interest in psychoanalysis, and her infamously troubled relationship with her mother, it bears highlighting that the “Visitation” pushes the role of ulcer-trigger onto the narrator’s daughter.

  In the poem, “Evolution,” Loy marvels at Nature’s progressive improvement of “increasingly/complex organisms/streamlined for survival,” asking, at the end of the poem:

  “what, in infinitude,

  will be our contour,

  our density,

  our potency?”

  Insel, as he appears in the “Visitation,” is the disembodiment of these speculations. With its images of prototypical growth and musings about man’s potential for future evolution, the novel prepares us for Insel’s reappearance, in the “Visitation,” as a new and improved version of himself. While the Insel of the novel remains a fundamentally corporeal being who absorbs and exudes electricity, the Insel of the “Visitation” is entirely, fleshlessly electric. Where once Jones was astonished at the extent of his arm’s reach (this page), the evolved Insel of the “Visitation” reaches across continents. In her dialogic essay “Mi & Lo,” Loy suggests that “a man aware of the fourth dimension, if enclosed within a room without exits, could get out of the room.” In the “Visitation,” Insel realizes this potential.

  In Insel, Jones wondered whether her pet Surrealist was somehow capable of existing in two states at once. In the “Visitation,” she clearly perceives him as an innately binary construct. Fed by an internal circulatory system, he is supported by a quasi-internalised, exo-skeletal “phosphorescent circulation.” This inconstant layer constitutes the aura glimpsed in the novel. A further comparison is made here between the nature of the normal man, in whom “good & evil are proportionately mixed,” and that of the drug addict, in whom these opposites alternate. The description of Insel’s “amazing dédoublement” is perhaps the most obscure component of the “Visitation.” Building on the novel’s frequent allusions to doublings, halvings and bisectionalities, Loy suggests that further evolution has enabled the surrealist artist, parthenogenetically, to split. By formulating his own simulacrum, Insel can exist bodily in Europe and spiritually in America.

  Although, in “History of Religion and Eros,” Loy had proposed that a “mystic” might, through training, gain control over atomic and electronic capabilities already latent within him, here it is the psychotropically enhanced surrealist artist who performs this feat. In the “Visitation” ’s depiction of how Insel achieves “the electronic transfer of his person through space” (“History of Religion and Eros”), Loy employs a number of highly elusive concepts. The genealogy of her startling image of the spinal column acting as conductor for a dynamizing life-force of immense voltage can be traced through “Mi & Lo” and the short story “Incident.” The “gland” which Insel suspects of enabling “the penetration of his mind by an extra-luminous radience” is, we can adduce from Loy’s wider oeuvre, the pineal gland. More mystical than medical, Loy’s notion of the pineal gland owes much more to the writings of Blavatsky than Bataille. The equally strange image of the “blind back” recurs in “Mi & Lo” and “The Child and the Parent.” A sort of psychic stopper which exists forever in the past, the blind back shuts off the ordinary human body from an infinite “cosmic consciousness.” It is “the shutter on the fourth dimension” which blocks off our entrance into that ordinarily unavailable zone (“Mi & Lo”). In the novel, Insel faces his blind back towards the future, thereby perverting this obstructive function (this page). Freed from the tri-dimensional incarceration that is the lot of the common man, the surrealist genius runs rampant in an invaded fourth dimension. This, we are given to understand, is how the “Visitation” came to pass.

  Throughout Insel, Loy connects the painter with machine technologies. Critics including David Ayers, Andrew Gaedtke, and Tyrus Miller have analyzed the operation of these technologies in the novel in relation to a complex of scientific and pseudo-scientific theories. They cite Loy’s readings on mysticism, early experiences with Crowleyite occultism and a Christian Science vocabulary of mesmerism, magnetism and rays. In the novel, Mrs. Jones presents the telepathic connectivity she shares with Insel as a phenomenon no less magical and unfathomable than the latest developments in interwar communications technology. Whereas Insel uses photographic
terminology in its description of the artist’s “development,” the “Visitation” depicts the surrealist spirit being “relayed” through the air as though by radio. Insel’s transatlantic manifestation is framed as an inter-psychic broadcast.

  Pre-eminent among Insel’s powers is his capacity to manipulate time. When he is at his most powerful, he becomes capable of enfolding his patron into his idiosyncratic timezone, applying himself variously in the novel to accelerate, decelerate and stop time. Reaching forward from 1938, the Insel of the “Visitation” remains paradoxically anchored, via an “antedeluvian tail,” to the past. Appearing to the narrator in the present, he simultaneously inhabits both past and future. A “primordial soft-machine”—he is a being at once ancient and ultra-modern. Insel’s anachronistic constitution is coded in a trail of bones, primitive tools and machines. Emitting “search-light shafts” from “future eyes,” he beams a premonition of imminent war back from the future. Ocular analogue to the smile of Alice’s Cheshire Cat, when the rest of him “fades,” it is his eyes that linger.